Installing Ubuntu is so easy a monkey could do it: place the CD in its drive, reboot the computer, tell the installer your language, your timezone, and the desired target location, and bam – you’re off and running. Installation was surprisingly fast; I left to watch TV at the start of the install, and by the end of the show (30 minutes later) everything had wrapped up nicely.
Out-of-the box, the vast majority of my hardware worked just fine. Some peripherals took a little extra work, and this was where I realized that Ubuntu wasn’t quite up to par with XP in terms of hardware support. (Not Ubuntu’s fault, of course – reverse-engineering hardware drivers can’t be fun.) In the event that others are looking for answers for particular hardware types, let me share what worked for me:
3D drivers for an ATI Radeon 9200 Pro (Model RV280): https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver
Epson Stylus CX8400 (printing and scanning fix): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=807612
Webcam: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam
After manually rigging these drivers, Ubuntu was a joy. The default software selection was most impressive, and adding new software was as easy as clicking “Add/Remove Applications” and selecting the new programs I wanted from a list. (Why does Windows call it “Add/Remove Programs”? I’ve never in my life used that link to add a program…)
From here on out I’ll probably drop the occasional blog post about my Ubuntu experience, but as of today I’ve gone almost 10 days without booting to XP. That should speak for itself.
Try Ubuntu for yourself at www.ubuntu.com.
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